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I sat down with Denise Warren, CFO of Franklin, Tenn-based Capella Healthcare, to discuss her career in finance, a traditionally male-dominated industry, and her experience over the past nine years working in health care. Every senior financial position at Capella is held by a woman.

Warren, a graduate of Southern Methodist University and Harvard Business School, started her career as an analyst, working for a series of financial firms before moving to Nashville to serve as CFO of Gaylord Entertainment Company. She was back in a senior analyst role at Nashville-based Avondale Partners when, in 2005, Tom Anderson, one the founders of health care startup Capella, gave her a call and asked her to come on board as CFO.

“I said, ‘Tom, in all seriousness, I don’t know anything about hospitals,’… [but] the piece that they needed was the Wall Street piece, which I had … all the things that are true finance-oriented, not hospital-oriented,” Warren recalled, and a few months later she joined the then five-month-old company’s leadership team.

“When I got here … I spent a lot of time learning hospitals, and learning health care, and I spent no time teaching them finance,” she joked. “That was my job security.”

When asked about the challenges of her days as a woman in the finance industry, Warren told me the story of an early job interview for an investment banking job. She was a little older than the man interviewing her, she said, having gone to school as a “student over traditional age,” and fielded questions she doubts male candidates would also have been asked.

He asked, for example, “Aren’t you kind of old?” and then, after pointing out the firm’s frequent long hours, “Do you have any kids? ... What are you going to do when you have to work until 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning?”

“In the beginning you saw that a lot,” Warren said. “The glass ceiling was very much in place.”

But these days, she added, women who have made it in male-dominated industries are aware of the challenges they faced and work hard to ensure members of younger generations have fewer roadblocks in their way. And here in Nashville, Warren said, there’s no hesitation among women in senior leadership positions to call on each other for support to ensure they pave the way effectively.

“You see the camaraderie among the women in the Nashville market, and that is quite exciting,” Warren said.

On tokenism and when to lean in – and when to lean out

As mentioned earlier, all the people in senior finance roles at Capella are women – a fact pointed out to Warren by Beth Wright, vice president of communications and marketing, when she joined the team.

“The amazing thing to me was that A, I never realized it, and B, we interviewed both women and men for all of the positions. … They got there because they were the most qualified and the best for that position,” Warren said.

Warren said that realization was particularly exciting for her because when she started her career in investment banking she was often the “token woman.” But while Warren isn’t interested in promoting women just for the sake of having women on the team, she does see the importance of capitalizing when you’ve got a workplace culture that’s accepting of female leadership.

“I think you have to know your audience,” Warren said of the culture espoused by books like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In.” “I think sometimes you have be lean in, and sometimes you have to be lean out. … I think you have to pick and choose your opportunities … and show by example, and lead by example, versus [saying,] ‘I can’t believe you have no women here.’”

​Xavier University sophomore Kilee Brookbank just presented a big check to a Cincinnati hospital that she credits with saving her life after she was badly burned when her home exploded because of a gas leak.